People often need to interact with resources that are able to respond to specific inquiries. The resources may be other people or automated systems capable of providing the necessary response. A few common scenarios where people assist incoming callers include customer service and ordering systems, as well as information and directory assistance systems. These systems may be fully or partially automated by replacing human resources with automated systems. Those skilled in the art will recognize various other types of attended and unattended systems, which provide information to requestors in response to various types of requests.
In these systems, the number of resources are limited and requestors of the resources are often placed in a queue until a resource becomes available. A queue management system (QMS) will monitor incoming requests and assign resources to requestors based on defined priority criteria.
Given the increasing number of situations where information resources are needed, as well as the wide acceptance of email and other data-based communications in addition to voice communications, the providers of resources can often communicate with the requestors via different communication technologies. For example, requestors may simply call in to an information retrieval system wherein a human or automated response system will ultimately be assigned to the requestor. Upon being assigned, the human or automated system will respond to some form of request by the requestor. Alternatively, the requestor may send an email requesting information, wherein the email is placed in a queue and ultimately assigned to either a human or automated system to generate a response to the email. The response may simply be another email sent to the requestor, or an initiated call to the requestor. Those skilled in the art will recognize various types of communications media such as instant messages, text based chat, and others, which can be utilized to communicate with the requestor.
Additionally, the available resources may be associated with different skill sets, experience, and areas of expertise, in addition to being able to communicate via different mediums. Unfortunately, existing queue management systems have difficulty handling different types of resources, let alone using different communication technologies to respond to requests. The combination of different types of resources and different communication abilities increases the difficulty in determining whether a resource is available. For example, typical call-based QMS systems will monitor whether a resource provider's telephone is on or off hook. If the telephone is on hook, the resource provider is assumed available. If multiple communication capabilities are supported by a given resource provider, the provider may be busy responding to an email, and as such, the status of the telephone does not bear on the availability of the resource.
Further, there is a desire to move away from central, dedicated QMS systems to more diverse and geographically dispersed architectures capable of supporting different types of resources as well as different techniques for interacting with requestors. Accordingly, there is a need for a way to determine the availability of resources having different skill sets, experience, and areas of expertise, and that may be geographically dispersed and capable of interacting with a requestor using different communication technologies.